He had to put all this together in his mind, figure what it could mean. Toby closed his eyes to blot out the eerie sight. “Dad . . . Those Cyaneans, the places the Cosmic Circle cut through—didn’t the Magnetic Mind say the mechs made them?”

“Yeasay,” Killeen said. “Some kind of barrier, like a sand trap or something. But this . . .”

Killeen’s words trailed away. Toby opened his eyes as the spreading structure became sharper, showing them how large it truly was. Honeycomb terraces, valleys, shelves. Ranks and ranks of hexagonal openings, spider-fine webs of struts and cabling. Or was that just a way for the human eye to put together a comprehensible picture, Toby wondered, make patterns it could comprehend?

The Bridge was silent. Argo creaked and strummed with random stretchings and compressions. Toby wondered how long the ship could take this massaging by forces far vaster than itself.

Jocelyn called, “Cap’n, we’re burning fuel hard and heavy.”

“I know.”

“It’s, it’s—we’ve got just minutes left. Unless—”

Something firmed in Killeen’s face. “In the old days at Citadel Bishop we’d go out scavenging. No matter what we found, we’d haul it back and claim that’s what we’d gone looking for.”

He looked slowly around the Bridge. Everybody, including Toby and Quath, regarded him blankly. “Might’s well do the same here.” He pointed at the honeycombed patterns bathed in slippery, flickering light. “That’s our goal, Lieutenant Jocelyn. Take us in, and be quick about it.”

A long silence. Toby saw in the drawn faces the knowledge that this was their last gamble. They would throw the dice, throw them now and forever, into inky shadows.

Then the moment passed. Jocelyn moved quickly, crisply. She drew maximum thrust from the ramscoop engines, her fingers flying over the boards. In his sensorium Toby could sense the ship’s magnetic fields surge as they spread wider, an invisible net that snagged passing matter, sucked it into the reaction chambers, and spewed it out the back. The deck vibrated. Joints rasped and shrieked. Acceleration felt like a kick in the rump. They shot over the ebony landscape.

“Where exactly, sir?” Jocelyn was cool and efficient. Toby admired the collected way she turned to Killeen, one eyebrow raised. Might as well meet Fate in style. “Ah . . .” Killeen’s eyes swept the details that skated by beneath them. A high whine cut the air as Argo fought against storming yet invisible forces. “There.”

A small green dot winked at the very tip end of a long, pointed peninsula. Jocelyn said, “That wasn’t there a moment ago.”

Into the hovering silence Toby said, “Maybe somebody’s turned on the porch light.”

He recalled his mother doing that in Citadel Bishop, when he went out late to play with his friends in the soft summer nights. A familiar yellow-white glow, shielded against mech detection. Feeble in the gathering dark, fitful, but always there. He had liked to chase the little birds that glowed when they flapped their wings. No matter how far into the brush he had pursued them, following their rustling and cawing, he could always see the distant beacon of home. Stay within view of the light, she had said.

A lamp tuned to human eyes, not mechs. Not that it did any good in the end, Toby thought ruefully.

The green glow seemed to swim up toward them. A cavern yawned below it. With a nod Killeen told Jocelyn to slip down into it.

A swift, silky glide. They braked to a stop between enormous inky cliffs.

Here, too, the honeycomb design repeated on smaller and smaller scales. Fitful technicolor displays sparked all along the great ebony flanks, reflecting the spikes of doomed matter streaking through the darkness above. It was as though this place was the very end of creation, solid and immovable, a night land beneath a restless, dying sky.

Then the honeycomb seemed to swell, to flicker—and they were inside the oily black walls. Inside whatever this thing was. With no visible transition.

Jocelyn eased the engines back. Killeen ordered the ship powered down to conserve energy. This brought a welcome calm to the deck. Quietness settled among them. There was nothing left to do now. No place left to go.

Still, Toby was startled when the watch officer at the main airlock hoarsely reported in. Everyone in the ship, Toby realized, was pulled tight enough to snap.

The watch Officer heard something. He patched it through. In the general sensorium the noise swelled, impossibly large and booming. It sounded for all the world like someone knocking on a door.

THREE

The Far Black

The man was a wrinkled dwarf, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“You’re from what era?” he asked, leading a band of five officers and Toby through a long, dimly lit corridor. A gloomy, low-ceilinged warren. Their boots rang on the hard, ceramic surface. Nobody answered, waiting for Killeen to break their silence, but he remained silent.

The dwarf shrugged. “Pretty recent, looks to be.”

Toby hadn’t seen the first encounter between Killeen and this short, muscular figure, but it didn’t seem to have settled anything.

“After the Calamity, as I told you,” Killeen said evenly. But his mouth was tight and bloodless.

“That doesn’t cut any thick air here, fella. All life’s a big old calamity, you look at it the right way.”

“Our home is the planet Snowglade, and I’ll thank you to keep your philosophy to yourself.”

The dwarf’s eyebrows arched, peering up at the Cap’n. “Oooh, you’re a systo-critic, eh?”

Killeen’s mouth twitched. Toby could tell his father was carefully feeling his way into a completely unknown situation. Strange, but looking completely ordinary. Killeen said formally, “We have come from the destruction of our world. We were led by portents and messages—”

“Fashion this—I had a chip installed just so I could speak this venac you’re squawking. So look, fella, I’d ’preciate some bandwidth here. Every ship comes limping in is from some esty pigeonhole, thinks we should know all their history, right down to the pimples on their cultural ass.”

“I expect respect for a delegation from a far outpost of—”

“Respect you’ll get from guys behind desks. Me, I got a job to do.” They reached the end of the corridor. Beyond yawned more round mouths of hallways.

Toby said, “I missed what you said earlier, so—well——what is this place?”

The dwarf blinked up at him. “Just an ordinary entrance portal. Better than most, I’d say, and—”

“No, I mean, what’s it a portal to?”

“Into the esty.”

“And what’s that?”

“Esty. S for space, T for time.” The dwarf waved them down a corridor and they kept walking. Doors slid open automatically as they passed. They ignored these invitations and behind them followed the whisk of closings.

“You mean we’re in some other kind of space-time here?” To Toby this place looked stupefyingly boring.

“Kids don’t learn much these days, do they?” the dwarf asked Killeen pointedly.

Toby couldn’t see how this shrunken little man could tell he was young, when Toby towered over him, and was searching for a barbed way to say this when Killeen murmured evenly, “We would all appreciate knowing what the hell this place is.”

“A stable chunk of convoluted esty. Inhabited. Governed. And now that you mention it, I haven’t heard any thanks for pulling you all in out of the Far Black.”